


Tell Me Which Road You Will Take

by bigmoneygator



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Drabble, F/M, Grief/Mourning, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 10:08:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3116156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigmoneygator/pseuds/bigmoneygator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>mourn·ing</b> ; <i>ˈmôrniNG/</i> noun, noun: mourning : the expression of deep sorrow for someone who has died</p><p>Fifteen years after Beth Greene's death, Daryl Dixon finds himself at her grave, or: things he should have said when she was still alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me Which Road You Will Take

**Author's Note:**

  * For [warmongerer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmongerer/gifts).



> based on a drabble prompt from my [daryl dixon rp blog](http://abetterangeltumblr.com) and a special thanks to my lovely [beth](http://whenimgxne.tumblr.com) for permission to post this here.

It's been years since he's been here; how many, he's not entirely sure. His bones creak more than ever in the morning -- too many years of sleeping on the ground catching up to him. He tries not to look in mirrors, but when he does, it's a grizzled face looking back at him. He's not remotely the person he was the last time he knelt in front of this particular tree and bowed his head and wept, openly and unabashedly, the keening noises of a lost animal. It felt wrong then. Like he was stealing grief from people who had more claim to it. It's taken him years, many of them, to realize that he was justified in his wailing, that he had just as much of a right to his sadness and mourning as anyone else.

He runs a thumb over the letters carved crudely into the tree, black with age, but still visible. He worried, at first, that he wouldn't be able to find it. But his feet carried him true, and he stands in front of Beth Greene's grave, same as he did when it was fresh.

He's never visited a grave before. Not even his mother's. Everyone else who died before the world went to shit -- he didn't care enough to visit. People slid in and out of his life with very little rhyme or reason, coming and staying for a while or just briefly flitting around before they disappeared. For all that bullshit that people used to spout about friends coming into your life for a reason, for you to learn something ... All Daryl ever learned was how to cut your losses and move on, how to say hello and goodbye in one breath, how to steel yourself for the inevitable emptiness a person could leave you with.

Not with Beth.

How could someone expect the end of the world? How could they so quickly adjust all of that _before_ bullshit, the happy mantras on wooden signs to the cold realities of the world gone to hell? He never expected someone like Beth to loom large in his life. She said once, in the still and the quiet, that they never would have met before the world ended. He didn't have it in him to tell her that he already counted the apocalypse as one of the best things that could have happened to him -- because why else would someone like him ever be impeded to change, to make something more of himself, without something so fucking catastrophic as the catalyst? -- but he thought it. He knew she was right, too. The good Catholic farmgirl that Beth used to be … she would have crossed the street to get away from Daryl, dirty and drunk and loud, smoking too many cigarettes and cussing up a storm.

He's not sure what to do now that he's here. He had been the one to insist, demand, rage that she had somewhere they could visit. That she not be left somewhere they couldn't find. He had been the one to carve her initials -- B.L.G. -- on the tree, tears flowing freely while Maggie _sobbed_ behind him. They haven't come back this way in _so long_. So long he's missing a finger from a careless ax swing. So long he's got new scars, twisted into his skin with no one to run their lithe, pale fingers over and tell him not to be ashamed. He wouldn't be, not of these. Not even the one covering the bridge of his nose, trailing onto a cheek -- remnants of a punch from an outsider, split open twice when a rope snapped and hit him in the face and again when he got knocked down during a run. He thinks she would have liked that one. These new scars aren't the sad left-behinds of a boy beaten down. They're the proof of a man surviving.

He finds himself babbling this to her, talking like she's right in front of him, staring at the carving he made. He tells her how big Judith's gotten, how sass-mouthed she is, how she talks like a proper redneck instead of a Southern belle, how proud she'd be. He tells her about how the group's expanded and he tells her about Maggie and Glenn's little boy -- not so little now, he realizes. He tells her about how angry he was when he lost his finger. How angry he was for so long after she died. How heartbreakingly lonely it was without her, at first. How lonely it still is.

He eases himself onto the ground, back against the tree, sitting with his legs straight out so he can almost imagine her in between them, back pressed to his chest. They did that a few times. He would've liked to do it more. Then again, there's a lot of things they only did a few times he would've liked to do more. He would've liked to hold her hand more, to play with her hair, to fall asleep with her curled in his arms. They didn't get enough time. _She_ didn't get enough time.

It hurts him somewhere deep, even now, that she died in that place. So unloved and alone. She was so close, _so close_ to being back to them. He tries to pretend he's made peace with it, that she died at least knowing that they were _there_ , but he hasn't. And he tells her so, tells her that he's sorry it took so long. Tells her he's sorry that she ever ended up in that place. Tells her that he knows she'd tell him that it wasn't his fault – but he still feels like it is. He's carried that weight for _so long_. He'd never admit to thinking about her every day, at least once, when a cloud rolls by and the sky is so blue it makes his teeth hurt or when the sun hits something metal and shines. He tells her now, though. Tells her that he likes to think she's there in those small things. Tells her that he doesn't pray to God and he doesn't think he ever will but sometimes when he wakes up and he's sweaty and feverish and his head is pounding so hard, he can't stop himself from whispering her name. He figures she knows that now, though. Figures she's there with them in other ways.

He tells her how he thinks that she was silly to say she had no more tears left because there is an ocean of them in him for her. He is one hundred percent water when it comes to the memory of her small hand splayed on his stomach, when it comes to hearing Maggie sing a song that she used to. He is nothing but tears and sadness and broken parts when it comes to her. He is not always these things, he knows. Just sometimes. He knows that, now. That he can be many things and still be himself. She started to teach him that, but it was a lesson he had to learn on his own.

He lights a cigarette and twists his hand into the grass -- the grass that must be, in part, some of her. He hates to think of her as bone and dust, alone in the dirt. But he can think of her as the grass under him, the tree behind him. He can think of how some of her breaths must still be around and how he's breathing some of her air even now.

"You said I was gonna be the last one standing, once," he rumbles, and the sound of his own voice surprises him, how hoarse with tears and age it is. He's half expecting to rise to standing and find himself that boy -- because he was still a boy, well and truly, almost forty or not -- and not the man, pushing sixty and missing parts. He's half expecting to stand up and to find Beth waiting for him with that smile on her face, eyes moon-round and hair trailing her waist. He's half expecting to not get up at all, to simply die here and be with her. There's still time to see what happens. There's still time to see if he'll be able to make it up or if he'll have to wait for someone in the group to come haul him to his feet. There's still time to see if his heart won't give out from exhaustion and too much loss.

"You were right about one thing, honey bee." He closes his eyes and he can picture her shy smile at the nickname he'd given her, nearly feel her hands around his wrists. "I miss you so bad."

He is, well and truly, surprised when he rises to his feet and nothing has changed, when every part of him feels like it's shifted somehow. 


End file.
